It was the first session of the first day: Pitch Perfect, presented by Chuck Sambuchino, Writer's Digest editor. The purpose of the session was "to provide guidelines for honing your pitch, help you get comfortable with presenting and give you the confidence you need to make a great impression every time you pitch." Primarily, it was meant to prepare us for something called Pitch Slam, scheduled for the following day.

I've had my view obscured by big hats before. I've had it obscured by big hair, tall people, and couples leaning head to head. But the opening session at the Writer's Digest Annual Conference was the first time I had my view obscured by a neck. A thick one, like a sea lion. Struggling to see around it forced me to lean at an unsustainable angle. Since it didn't really matter what the speaker onstage looked like, I gave up trying to see around the neck and simply listened.

The neck in front of me served as a conduit for a rich, booming voice with a classic New York accent. Queens, I guessed. When the guy raised his hand and asked a question, my friend and I looked at each other, mouths agape and wide eyed, as if to say, "Did you hear that?"

The guy was tall and barrel chested, looking more like a bouncer or a body guard than a writer. Then again, writers are rarely just writers, and since the Writer's Digest Annual Conference caters to all sorts—from the little girl attending with her mother to the old woman next to me taking notes in short hand—it's possible the big man was there to pitch a story about his life working for a notorious New York mob boss, or maybe as Taylor Swift's bodyguard.

"What about pen names?" the big man asked. "Can I pitch to agents using a pen name?"

"Aha!" I thought. "I was right! He wants to use a pseudonym to avoid deadly repercussions! Perhaps he is in the witness protection program and can't afford to blow his cover when he reveals where all the bodies are buried."

I thought about the medical technician at my retina specialist's office — a big guy with the same build as the guy seated front of me, and with a similarly resonant baritone voice. (His accent is from New Jersey, but it's a subtle distinction.) He has a crushing handshake and rides a Fat Boy Harley. If you ran into him on the street you probably wouldn't guess he spent his days injecting sodium fluorescein into people's veins.

So who knows, maybe the guy with the big neck was a poet. Maybe he just wanted to use a pseudonym simply to prevent his buddies from learning of his secret life as a sensitive artist.

Pitch Slam was, perhaps, the biggest draw of the conference. What is it?

On the day of the event, you’ll meet one-on-one with as many of your preferred agents and editors as possible in the 1-hour time slot. Each pitch meeting lasts 3 minutes, including 90 seconds to pitch and 90 seconds for agent/editor feedback and discussion.

Like speed dating but, instead of looking for someone to fall in love with, you are looking for someone to fall in love with your book project.

Although I was excited about the opportunity to meet some literary agents face to face, at first I found the whole concept of Pitch Slam a little hokey and contrived. But, actually, being forced to distill your 80,000 word story into a 90 second pitch was a great way to focus and really figure out what the hell your book is about.

I attended the conference with my friend Laura, who has also recently completed a novel and was there for the same reasons I was: to figure out our next steps. We had time to kill before our Pitch Slam session began and we ran out for a coffee.

"You don't have a hair brush do you?" Laura asked as we stood in line at Starbuck's.

"Um. No."

"I can't believe I forgot to bring a brush. How's my hair look?"

"It looks fine," I said. "Relax."

"Can you see all my gray?"

"I don't see any gray."

"I have tons of gray. Are you sure I don't look like a Women's Studies professor?"

She played with her hair, nervously combing her fingers through it.

"Why not ask the barista for a fork?" I said.

"You know, that's actually not a bad idea."

With our iced coffees and a fork, we returned to the hotel and hunted around for a place to sit and psych ourself up for the Pitch Slam. There was one relatively quiet room with an old guy and a young mentor of some sort helping the the guy hone his 90 second pitch. His hair was beyond gray—totally white, wispy, and wild. We eavesdropped:

"I'm half Catholic and half Jewish," he said to his tutor.

"You needn't bother getting into all of that," she told him. "Stick with the book."

"It's called Vampires in the Vatican . . ."

Honestly, it might not have been the actual title, but it's apparently what his book was about.

"I envy that guy," I said to Laura. "He can boil his book down to four words: Vampires in the Vatican. It's all you need to hear and you get it."

"For better or worse," said Laura. "Although it's actually a great name for a Goth band."

With five minutes left before the beginning of our Pitch Slam session, we walked to the end of the long, growing, line.

"How's my hair look?" said Laura.

"Totally forked."

The room was filled with 66 agents—give or take a last minute cancellation or two. I had marked up my program in advance and looked around the room for the ones I had circled. I found one and dove in:

"Hello, my name is Jamie, nice to meet you. My book is called THERE IS A SEASON, It's a character driven work of literary fiction set between New York City and rural western Pennsylvania. 80,000 words, complete.

At 36, Rachel Reese, the adopted daughter of an abusive and controlling mother and a mentally unstable father, finally discovers the tragic story of her birth mother — a schizophrenic who had been institutionalized her entire adult life — lending new insight into Rachel’s own troubled existence and further fueling a fear of commitment to the only healthy relationship she’s ever known."

"Tell me," the agent said when I was finished, "What, to you, makes your novel literary?"

"Hmm . . the lack of plot?"

She laughed. "I appreciate your honesty."

"Well, seriously, I do think my book has a plot. It might even has a sub plot. But it's really about the character. How she evolves."

She appeared skeptical and I braced myself for a no. Instead she told me she'd be willing to read more and gave me her card.

"Send me the first three chapters and a synopsis. Be sure to put WD is the subject line so I know we met here."

The second agent told me to send her the entire manuscript. "It sounds dark," she said. "I like dark."

It hadn't really occurred to me that it was dark, though I guess it is. It's no Vampires in the Vatican, but . . .

Anyway, on it went, until the hour was up. In the end I got to sit with six agents, each one asking for sample pages, if not the entire manuscript. With a pocketful of business cards, I figured they must ask for pages from everyone but, when it was over, I found Laura commiserating with another writer. After three rejections, Laura said she lost her mojo and quit.

The other writer got discouraged after an agent told her that her historical fiction set during World War II wasn't historical enough: "The 1940's isn't historical fiction, it's just fiction." She, too, gave up.

Afterwards, Laura and I went to lunch.

"Did you get any suggestions or criticisms at all?" Laura wanted to know.

"Well, no. Not out loud. I could see it in their eyes when they weren't fully convinced, but no one said anything."

"Someone told me I shouldn't set my book in the '90s," said Laura. "They said I should set it in the '80s instead."

As I mentioned previously, my wife fell in love with a blind kitten she saw listed on a pet rescue website. The poor little guy had other problems, too, requiring more specialized care than I thought we could handle and I managed to talk Deborah out of the idea. Instead, we visited PETCO during a meet-and-greet adoptable cats event to see about alternatives.

On our way to the store we passed a guy with a big smile and a small dog surrounded by a crew of fawning friends. We wondered if he hadn’t just adopted the dog a few minutes earlier.

“Is the PETCO thing dogs and cats?” I asked Deborah.

“I didn't think so, but maybe it is.”

A half block further we passed a mobile ASPCA adoption truck.

“Oh, maybe that’s where he got his dog.”

The truck had a big fiberglass dog face on the front of it, and pictures of dogs pasted all over the sides leading us to assume it was “dogs only.” We didn’t stop.

The meet and greet began at noon and we arrived exactly on time. Nevertheless, out of the dozen or so cats inside the store, about half were marked with a variety of neon colored PostIt notes indicating they were unavailable: “HOLD” “AWAITING PICKUP” and so on. As a result, the selection was slim. Most of the cats were huddled in the back of their respective cages dreading the parade of gawkers that was already beginning to stream in—ourselves included. After about an hour Deborah decided she really liked a funny little grey and white guy with the rather unimaginative name of “Tom.” He was by far the most charming.

“What do you think?” she asked.

“What do you think?”

“I think we should get him.”

“Okay, then let’s do it.”

“Did you find one you like?” said a woman next to us. She was not associated with the store or the adoption process in any way, just a lookey-loo like us. She proceeded to tell us how to care for cats, what to feed them, and so on. She went on and on and was still talking as Deborah and I turned to find someone with the authority to help is.

“How come every time we are at a vet’s office or a pet store, there’s always some random old lady hanging out who feels compelled to educate us?”

“Always,” said Deborah.

We found the woman in charge and told her we were interested in Tom. She handed us a clipboard and a pen and told us to fill out the forms.

“Geez,” said Deborah, scanning the lengthy questionnaire.

After filling in the form we were told it would be another half hour before someone became available to interview us.

Okay, we'll be back, we told her, and headed to lunch.

“Aren’t you excited?” Deborah said as we walked to a nearby diner.

“Sure, yeah, you know me.” I said. I pointed at my face. “This is me, excited.”

“What are we going to name him? We can’t call him Tom.”

“That’s for sure. But I don’t know. We’ll probably call him a bunch of things until something sticks. One step at a time.”

After lunch, we had to wait another ten minutes before the girl at PETCO became available. Eventually, she came over and proceeded to grill us, going over the answers we had written on the application form and asking for more detail. Deborah was getting agitated and annoyed at the scope of information that was required, but she bit her tongue until we finally made it to the next phase of the process.

“Okay, this all looks pretty good.," the woman said. "We’ll need to contact your current veterinarian, of course, in order to verify the information you gave us is all good." (We had told her about Rory, our recently deceased cat, as well as Miss Velvet, our surviving one.)

Deborah rolled her eyes. “Seriously? How long is it going to take? I mean, can we wait, or should we come back in an hour?”

“Oh,” the girl said. We don’t do same day adoptions. I’m surprised nobody told you that. No no no. Once we verify all of your information, we will schedule a home visit with one of our volunteers.”

“A home visit?”

“Yes, to inspect your apartment.”

“Are you kidding me?” Deborah was irritated at the thought of being inspected and judged by a girl who appeared to be not much older than the cat we were there to replace. “I’ve had cats my entire life. My last cat lived to be sixteen years old. I know how to care for a cat."

“Will they bring the cat with them when they come?” I asked.

“No,” the girl said. “Assuming you pass the inspection, you then come back here and pick him up the following weekend.”

“So best case scenario, we can get him next week?”

The girl flipped through a stack of pages on her clipboard and shook her head. “No. I’m afraid the volunteer who is assigned to do home inspections in your part of Brooklyn is away on vacation right now. She probably won’t be available for another two weeks.”

Deborah and I looked at each other. The woman, sensing our combined disappointment and irritation suggested we talk it over then added, somewhat judgmentally, “If you really want a cat right away you can always go to the ASPCA.”

She wrote her phone number on one of her neon colored PostIts and told us to text her once we decided what we wanted to do.

We left the store and grumbled on the street. “I don’t want some dopey volunteer coming into my apartment to see if I’m worthy enough to have a cat,” said Deborah.

“You can't blame them for wanting to screen out the knucklheads but I don't really want anyone coming to our apartment, either. If that’s their procedure, though, there’s not much we can do about it.”

“Should I text her and just say, forget it?”

“Why don’t we take a ride uptown to the ASPCA first. If we can’t find anything there, we'll have to wait, anyway. What time is it? The ASPCA website says to arrive two hours before closing for same day adoption.”

"Two hours? Why?"

"To leave enough time for another colonoscopy, I guess."

As it turned out, the ASPCA’s process wasn’t nearly as rigorous. Essentially all we needed was to show ID, answer some questions, and sign a promise that we were telling the truth. Once we finished with our paperwork, a woman arrived to show us the available cats.

“I’m a dog person myself,” she told us. “I just started with the cats a month ago. They are so different from dogs.”

She was very friendly, but not the best person to answer our questions. Fortunately, there were plenty of other workers on site who could.

When we finally found a cat we liked, the woman had to double check to see if he was still available.

He wasn’t.

"We're not having any luck today, are we?"

While casually talking between ourselves about our recently deceased Rory, and wishing there had been a young orange cat available, someone overheard and said, “You might like Augustine. He's a nine month old orange cat. He’s a real sweetheart. Adorable. He had one of his hind legs amputated, but he’s a charmer.”

Deborah and I looked at each other, then looked at the volunteer: “Where is he?”

“He’s out on the truck today," she said. "If he hasn’t been adopted, he’ll be coming back here at the end of the day. You can wait if you want. Let me make a call and make sure he's still available."

He was.

"The mobile truck packs up at five o’clock. It’ll probably take them another half hour or forty minutes to get back here from Union Square . . .”

“Wait," I said. "He was on the mobile truck in Union Square? We were down there earlier. We thought they only had dogs on that truck.”

The woman shrugged.

“We’ll wait.”

“You won’t regret it He’s the sweetest.”

We waited.

And waited.

And waited.

When the truck finally arrived, she was right.

The wait was worth it, we decided, so we took him home and named him Baskets.

My uncle Tom, a talented and enthusiastic artist with no shortage of fantastical ideas, passed away last year, but it wasn’t until a couple of weeks ago that I had an opportunity to dig through some of his old art supplies. Digging through the chilly corner of my parents’ garage where my uncle's things were stored, I filled a small grocery bag with whatever looked promising.

Once home, I weeded out the rock hard tubes of paint, rusty pen nibs, and brushes with bad perms, leaving me with little more than a few pencils and a cool vintage sharpener.

Nevertheless, I felt inspired and went to the local art store to get a bottle of fresh ink, a brush, and some paper.

Feeling cramped and unsteady, I started off slowly, rediscovering old techniques and experimenting with new ones.

“Ah,” I said, flipping to a fresh white page, “now I remember why I used to like doing this so much.”

If I didn’t have an astronomical phone bill hanging over my head from last month, I might have called Brian back. Instead, I waited.

“Sorry dude,” he said when we reconnected. “I tried calling you from inside the cottage, but I should have known that wouldn’t work. I just climbed the hill behind my house for a decent signal. It’s beautiful up here, but it’s fucking freezing. The weather has been all over the place.”

Brian has been spending the past few months working on home improvements to his family’s cottage nestled in a hidden corner of Ireland. It’s not remote per se — small town of about a thousand people, with a main road that swerves within inches of Brian’s front door — but, with no television, no radio, no Internet, and neighbors who like to keep to themselves, it has the same effect.

We hadn’t spoken in a month or more so I gave him the latest, beginning with the current events I knew would interest him most: “Sir George Martin died, did you hear about that?”

“No dude. I don’t hear anything over here—other than the mule across the road."

We talked a little politics, but since he has the option of hunkering down in his remote Irish hideout if shit turns sour, he didn't seem too concerned. “People are so fucking stupid," was all he had to say about it.

“It’s like that George Carlin bit," I said, "Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that."

“So true.”

I turned the conversation more personal. I told him about the death of my cat. Brian knew Rory well—Rory would often sleep next to Brian whenever Brian crashed on our couch. He was sad to hear about it.

This coming from a guy who lives out of a suitcase, of course, but it didn't matter anyway; Deborah can be persuasive when she wants to be. She fell in love with an eyeless kitten that she saw on an adoption website. The poor thing has balance issues, too—a real handful. Adopting it is not going to happen for us but, you know, that's how she opens the negotiations. Even if I counter with "no new kittens" it's hard not to foresee a fur covered compromise.

I changed the subject and gave him some updates on my recently completed novel. Brian had read the early drafts and provided me with a lot of helpful feedback. He has been very encouraging and I knew he’d be happy to hear that the full manuscript was currently under review by three separate literary agents.

“We’ll see,” I said. “Just because they requested a full manuscript doesn’t mean they’ll end up offering me representation. But it’s better than a form letter rejection, anyway.”

“Yeah, man, you gotta manifest.”

“Manifest?”

“You know, before you go to bed every night, focus on your goals and visualize them as being things that are already true. You already have an agent, you already are a published author, and so on. You gotta get on that shit."

“Is that how it's done?”

“I’m telling you, man: Manifest.”

“How’s it been working out for you?”

“Just wait,” he said, brimming with confidence. “When I get back to the States, big things are going to happen. You’ll see.”

Rory came into my life through the side door. He was part of a package deal when I met my wife, Deborah. At the time. I was living the free and easy life of a pet-less bachelor and cats weren't something I thought much about. It's not that I didn't like them — I'd had cats before — but, at that point in my life, l just couldn't be bothered.

"I hope the cats are okay," Deborah would worry whenever she spent the night at my apartment.

"Don't worry, they'll be fine. Come back over here . . ."

The cats were always fine, of course, though the same could not always be said for Deborah's apartment. Rory (and Deborah's other cat, Miss Velvet) were so skilled at scratching, biting, and knocking things over that she'd often return to an apartment in shambles. I sometimes wondered why she put up with it.

Rory, in particular, was a little brat. Five years old when I met him he was in prime trouble-making form. Deborah even blamed him for the death of her previous cat, Mr. Hadji.

"Poor Hadj," Deborah would say, shaking her head at the vintage tobacco tin on her nightstand that held Mr. Hadji's ashes. "Rory terrorized him."

I had never liked orange cats. Not because of any negative experiences with one, in fact, other than to watch Morris be a little snoot in 9-Lives commercials, I never had any experience with one at all — I just wasn't attracted to them much.

But, as with any other racial prejudice, things changed once I opened up and gave Rory a chance. The little scamp was nothing if not charming.

"You're going to miss him when he's gone," my wife would say whenever she caught me carrying Rory on my shoulder, or saw us napping on the couch. Or, in later years, when we put him in a harness and took walks around the block.